Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Consistency

Thanks to the rain storms and freezing cold weather, today is the first time I've been able to ride Lilly in almost a week. The weather was finally perfect, the arena was nice and dry, and I was loving it. Rain is in the forecast again for Friday, though, so it looks like the dry arena will be short lived.

Let me just say how wonderful, amazing, and fabulous it is to finally have a horse that maintains a consistent speed at the jog and lope. We can actually work on things other than slow down... slow down... slow down... I can ask her for a jog and then work on other things like keeping her round, asking her to bend, and keeping her shoulders up. We can do circles, figure eights, and patterns at a nice, slow speed. It's been a long time coming and I'm glad we finally made it!

Precious, sweet, and the best pony ever!

We had some gorgeous lope circles today, but her unassisted transitions really need work. She'll lope off like a well mannered lady, but she pops a wheelie every time I ask for the transition. If I take hold of her, and force her into a pretty transition she'll do it, but if I just ask and leave her to do it as she wants, I get the wheelie. I'm not sure if that's just what she needs to do at this stage in the game, or if she's just being lazy. As many transitions as we've done, you'd think she have the rules down by now, so perhaps I need to switch it up and try something else.

Looking cute with no boots today!

I tried her without the boots since the arena was freshly dragged and she did great! She was tender stepping from the sandy arena to the concrete driveway, but I was able to work her pretty hard in the arena without her taking short steps every few strides. I was very happy about that, since one of my goals with her hooves is to be able to show her without the boots. We might need them to walk around the show grounds, but I'd like to be able to pull them before our classes. I think we're making progress there!

We rode in the mecates with a saddle for the first time and I love them! I love a good pair of split reins, but I feel like I can work her more productively with the mecates. They don't flop around and get stuck under my leg while we're loping and it's really easy to adjust the length when we (she) have a brain fart.

Lilly's boyfriend was in the arena with us today and she was oblivious to him. He, on the other hand, was a "jackass" and his mom said it was because he was showing off for Lilly. Lilly gets blamed for that a lot. They were having a lesson, so I felt bad that we were in there encouraging his mischief, but I just tried to be courteous and stay out of their way. Not much else I can do other than that!

I'm sure you're getting tired of seeing the same kinds of pictures over and over again, but I don't have much to work with. I broke my camera today too, so now it won't auto-focus... that'll make getting different pictures even more difficult, unless I can get it fixed soon!